


Behind the Stars

by illwynd



Category: Thor (2011)
Genre: Angst, M/M, bad physics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-24
Updated: 2011-09-24
Packaged: 2017-10-24 00:11:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/256660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illwynd/pseuds/illwynd
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some time after his fall from the Bifrost, Loki has a change of heart and hopes to be accepted by the Avengers and his brother. But some things are just too broken to fix.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Behind the Stars

**Author's Note:**

> Written in response to a prompt (http://norsekink.livejournal.com/3415.html?thread=7655511#t7655511) in the norsekink LJ comm.

Loki, the Liesmith, called the fire that burns, the silver-tongued transgressor of boundaries, the deceitful one, known across the ages as an utterly untrustworthy outrage against all that is good and decent… had gotten rather used to living on Midgard as something more akin to a fairy godmother than a trickster god. It had taken some time. When Thor had been banished there the first time he had gone only as part of his plan, arriving to convince his brother that he could not return to Asgard, and he had not given the place much thought beyond what was necessary to pass as an ordinary human of this era. But then it had all gone wrong, and he had fallen there after what seemed an eternity in the darkness between realms.

That time had been like nothing he had ever known. He had let go, and Thor’s face had receded away and his shout had faded and at first Loki had fallen, pulled swiftly down by the swirling remains of the Bifrost. Then he had slowed, until he tried to reach out in confusion as if there might be something arresting his fall, some thick mysterious ether in which he might swim or fly. His floundering did nothing, though, and then for what seemed a very long time he merely drifted, shards of shimmering glassy color washing against him with a painful sensation like sand in a powerful wind or pinpricks of driven snow in the coldest part of the winter. He had sometimes tried to cry out in rage or throat-sick horror, though of course no one would hear him, but the sound did not emerge from his lips. It was then he realized that the patterns of stars, of light and color and deep inky black night, remained even when he closed his eyes. And he had known then that he was not truly falling. It may have been millennia that he was suspended there, and he did not sleep, and for a long while all that filled his mind was the image of Thor’s stricken look as he let his fingers uncurl from around the shaft of Gungnir. And then the place that he was in, the place that was not a place, grew gradually darker.

Until there was a sudden, sourceless flash and a feeling like the world had tilted underfoot though there was no ground to shift. He felt it throughout his body—he was suddenly aware of his body again after so long of being nothing more than the-one-who-is-thinking-this—every cell prickling with something like fear, and the darkness around him grew deeper as if something very massive were passing by nearly close enough to touch, casting a great shadow and dragging him along in its wake like driftwood after a ship. He began to wonder what the thing was and whether it had known he was there, but the thought was wiped away as he realized that he was falling again, falling faster, tumbling through the air, and then even as he cried out in relief at the sudden change, he struck the ground with a bone-jarring impact.

He was once again on Midgard. In a place called Kansas. He would later find this very funny indeed, but at first it was merely bewildering. As if he did not have enough to torment him—having lost his home, his family, his identity, and his dreams all in one fell blow of his own making—he had to adjust to the strange, brusque ways of modern Midgard. The memory of the time spent behind the stars faded quickly from his mind as he involved himself in a myriad of little schemes and plans, filling with fury and laughter the emptiness left behind by everything that had been taken from him.

By the time the Asgardians repaired the bridge and Thor returned to become the guardian of the Midgard he had grown to love, some hidden part of Loki was practically frantic, though he did not show it, while the other part trembled with anticipation. For a time he stayed back in the shadows, watching Thor on the television news. Loki followed him at first in secret as he went from place to place with his Avengers, and he busied himself with planning what he might do to the brother who had been so changed. He felt his heart lurching painfully in his chest when he first stood in one of Thor’s thunderstorms on this world, and it was fortunate that the rain streamed down his cheeks or else he would have had to come up with a lie for his own comfort as he hugged his wet shoulders tightly and let his chin droop and felt the rumble of thunder like a physical touch against his skin.

He had not realized how often he had lied to himself, but he kept it up as he taught himself how to get by as a villain on Midgard. Of course he was able to adjust, he being quite clever, and it is not as if the realm was overflowing with intelligent competition of his caliber. There is always a niche for an inventive and enterprising being, and he’d had centuries to perfect the art of malicious mischief. And he had the strong motivation of wishing to needle his brother, the only one in Asgard who had ever truly cared for him. He amused himself for quite some time with this calling.

And then, abruptly, with no explanation, he stopped. He disappeared and spent a month wandering various of the Midgardian countries, thinking, and when he returned he came to the mansion belonging to Tony Stark, the meeting-place of his brother’s allies and friends, and there he waited once he had magicked himself inside. He knew it would not be long, and he was right.

Thor burst in when he had just finished idly taking apart one of the small technological gadgets that seemed to be everywhere in the place, and Loki did not even have time to push aside the pile of wires and bits of metal before Thor had grasped him, wrapping one hand around his wrist and the other around his neck and lifting him bodily into the air, moving them both toward the wall until his back hit it with a thump that knocked away his breath. Through it all Loki kept his eyes locked on his brother’s face.

Distantly he realized that Thor’s outraged shouting had stopped. “You’re not disappearing or trying to smite me with your magic,” his brother said, voice thick with suspicion, “and you’re not trying to convince me that you’re innocent.”

Loki nearly smirked despite himself. It was undeniable—it had worked not even half a year ago when he had done that. For a whole three days he had played the victim and ingratiated himself with the Avengers, pretending that Doom had manipulated him into his most recent evil deeds. And the time before that, he had made them all believe that he had been brainwashed and tortured into participating in a particularly destructive scheme. He had thoroughly enjoyed Thor’s attempts to nurse him back to mental health; from the midst of his listless stupor he had carefully not-suggested that his sense of self-worth had been destroyed (ha!) and that it was necessary that Thor should spend all his time in praise of his poor, helpless, emotionally scarred little brother. The humans had even had books that backed up the idea, and it had been almost impossible to keep a straight face as Thor so earnestly went about that solemn duty. Of course he could hardly blame Thor now when he distrusted the honest change of heart. But he had been prepared for that.

“No, I’m not. I would not presume to tell you what to believe. I have come only to allow you your vengeance,” Loki said. He knew the look on his face was one of genuine contrition. He had faked it often enough. But now… their last confrontation, two months before, had ended with their positions reversed. Loki with his magic had pinned his brother against the wall, had leaned close, his face a vicious mask, had insulted and threatened and had touched Thor’s cheek in a mockery of a caress. It was the look of disdain Thor wore—a sort of bland disregard that Thor had never turned on him before—that had driven him to say what he said then.

And of course, his brother would not believe him if he retracted the words.

He watched now as Thor wavered. The hand that had held his wrist had long since dropped to reach threateningly for his hammer, though he still held tight to Loki’s neck, so tight that the words came out as only a strained and breathy whisper. “But please, brother, make it quick.”

They were the right words, of course. The mighty Thor is merciful in the face of weakness. Both hands loosened and blood and air rushed back into Loki’s head, making him briefly giddy as his heels touched the ground. Only then did either of them notice the audience that had gathered in the doorway of what turned out to be Tony Stark’s bedroom.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” said Stark, breaking the silence.

Loki had smiled wanly at him and rubbed at his neck. None of them had exactly believed him, but he had indeed flouted their expectations by not turning against them or even simply disappearing in a haze of laughter and green smoke after several days. He dutifully accompanied them to meet any enemies against which his powers could avail them in the slightest, and he otherwise remained a quiet, unassuming presence in their lives, at least as far as he was able. There was the occasional pants-related invisibility spell, but that was completely harmless. Once even Natasha had laughed. He had to get points for that.

He came to realize, as time passed with little change, that it would never be enough. He was still not welcome in Asgard. The Avengers were still… well, not as suspicious of him as they had once been, but he certainly did not fit among them the way Thor did. And as for Thor, he sometimes felt that the brother he knew was still awaiting him on the ruin of the Bifrost, for this was someone else entirely.

Once he snuck into the room Thor had taken as his own as his brother slept. He had stayed there the whole night, watching him, perched on the chair across from the bed with his chin resting on one hand. In the silent hour before dawn, he had wandered closer, crouching by the head of the bed so he could peer more closely at Thor’s face.

It was the same face that had disappeared out of reach as he fell, the same face that had haunted him as he floated eternally between worlds, the same face that had been always nearby, bright and smiling, throughout his life. Loki bit his lip and leaned closer until his head almost rested on the mattress beside Thor’s pillow, aching for something he could not admit, fingers reflexively curling and spreading on the sheet between them. As long as he could remember, he’d had dreams he would never speak of, and his brother’s face and form filled them. He could feel the warmth radiating from Thor’s sleeping form, and it wrung a soft whimper from his lips.

Thor’s eyes flashed open at the sound, but the look of alarm was wiped away nearly as quickly as it appeared. Instead it was replaced with an expression of weary annoyance.

“You do realize that every day I wonder when it will be that you will decide you have had enough of this game and betray us, do you not?” Thor asked him then, voice raspy with sleep. “Every day, I wonder what you hope to get out of this.”

Loki rocked backward on his heels and rose smoothly to his feet, disguising the sudden weakness in his limbs with controlled, composed motions. He didn’t say anything, slipping out of Thor’s room without a word, without a second glance. That day he had avoided Thor when he emerged into wakeful daylight and he withdrew from the others, or would have if they had made any attempt to speak to him. When night came again, Loki was weary enough after a sleepless night and a long, anxious day that he fell instantly into dreams.

Dreams in which he was a child again, heart beating with knife-edged longing as he watched Thor laughing and sparring with Sif and Fandral. Dreams in which Odin led him by the hand toward the glowing, icy-blue Casket and looked on with his single eye as the Jotun skin washed inexorably over Loki’s shivering body. Dreams in which Thor held him as he had when they were small and in need of comfort, but instead, now grown, they looked at each other and truly saw, and he poured all of his apologies into the kiss, the motion of his pleading hands against his brother’s body, and Thor forgave him, because Thor had always forgiven him until...

And then came a dream in which he hung helpless and suspended behind the stars, and the darkness began to scream.

He awoke shaking. He could feel it in the pit of his stomach, and he was in motion before he realized what it was he felt. In his frantic hurry, he nearly bowled over Steve Rogers (one of the earliest risers in the house and the only one who had even made an attempt to make Loki feel welcome among them—it hadn’t worked, but Loki appreciated the effort) and he started to call out an apology in his own wake, thought better of it and began instead to laugh evilly, shouting some spur-of-the-moment cliché banter.

He wasn’t sure why until he was miles away and the feeling grew more distinct. Something was coming from the other side of the stars. It was better if Thor believed the day of Loki’s betrayal had finally come, for there was nothing any of them could do against the thing but die. Loki at least had brushed against it before and knew…

“Something is coming,” he murmured to himself as he sent himself halfway around the world with a gesture, and then did it again and again, hoping to feel his way to the location before the thing fully appeared. “I will be there in time…”

Four minutes and thirteen seconds later, Loki lay on the side of a bare-stone mountain, crushed and bleeding, the faint mist of exhalations in the cold air the only sign that he wasn’t dead yet.

Four minutes and thirteen seconds was quite long enough for him to wonder whatever possessed him to become the sort of person who would heroically dash off to save the world, even knowing that no one who knew him would ever believe he had done so. It was quite long enough for him to wonder what would have happened if he’d just stayed in bed and ignored it all and maybe gone back to a more pleasant dream. It was long enough for his life to flash in front of his eyes and for him to bury his face in his hands for half of it at least. But he did none of this—he was too busy trying to stay alive and knowing he wouldn’t, and the only thing that flashed in front of his eyes was—

*

Thor frowned. “Gamma rays?” he asked, uncertain.

“There’s no doubt about it,” Tony replied. “Picked up by several detectors around the world, a source at the edge of the atmosphere and one on the surface, and there’s already speculation that it looked a lot like the very start of a gamma ray burst and it just didn’t get that far. And it happened at, oh, a little after five this morning. What time did you say Loki ran out of here like a bat out of Hell this morning, Steve?”

“A little after five.”

Thor looked from one of them to the other, and then to Clint and Natasha.

“So which do we think it is?” Clint asked, voicing the collection question. “Do we have a Loki situation involving Gamma rays, or do we have a situation involving Gamma rays and Loki will have it all cleaned up by the time we get there?”

“Did my brother say anything to you?” Thor asked, turning to Steve.

Steve tilted his head and twisted his lips as if he wasn’t sure how to answer. “He said something about nobody expecting his sudden but inevitable betrayal,” he admitted after a minute. “But I don’t think he meant it.”

“This is Loki you speak of,” Thor said, dubious. “The same Loki who has tricked me more times than I can remember, who has attempted to kill all of us, and has managed to kill quite a large number of other beings—mortals, Aesir, and Jotnar alike. He killed his own parent. Betrayal is in his nature.”

“You should have seen his face,” Steve replied, his voice soft. “He looked terrified. Just for a second, I mean, before he caught himself and put on that sort of angry little smile he always used to have when we fought him.”

“Well, we must find him either way. We will discover which of us knows my brother better, when we do.”

With Stark leading the way, reading off a map with a bunch of triangulated Gamma ray readings, they started the search. Within two hours they had the location narrowed down to a certain mountain, though it seemed unlikely that anyone would still be hanging around so long after the fact.

*

Loki had regained consciousness for long enough to drag himself a few feet away from the scorched spot on the rocks, where the thing from beyond the stars had died and nearly taken him with it. It had been difficult to think of a reason why he should bother to move, but he had never been one to accept things as they were. His situation would be dramatically improved, he’d thought, if he had a slightly more rounded boulder to dig into his back. So thinking, he’d dragged himself across the ground with his good arm, feeling only a little distressed at the amount of blood that had frozen into his clothing and seeped onto the rocks under him. It was a good thing he was a frost giant, he thought, or he’d have died of hypothermia already. That didn’t explain why the blood loss hadn’t killed him, though it still had a good chance at it. He couldn’t quite make it to the roundest boulder, but he found that there was a nearer rock that made a comfortable pillow. He let his head rest against it and stared up at the pale wintry sky.

He had spent every last ounce of his magic on killing the star-thing and sealing the tunnel that had brought it here. He had none left to heal himself.

There was a cloud above that was shaped vaguely like Mjollnir, he realized with a smile.

He had gone too far. He wasn’t sure when. Too long ago, now. He had known it for a long time, had known that Thor would never again trust him. That he had lost whatever love they had once shared.

He wished that it would rain; he wished to hear the thunder and feel the rain on his face. Of course, if it stormed now, it would be snow, and he could barely take the thought of that. He found that the sky was growing dark, though, and wondered suddenly whether it was storm clouds indeed or nightfall. But then he realized it was only his eyes.

When the thunder came, he opened them again in confusion. When had Thor arrived? When had Thor gathered him in his arms? It was a dream, certainly.

“I stopped it, brother,” Loki whispered through the pain in his chest, feeling hot tears spring to his eyes. “For you. So you would see me again.”

He tried to raise his good arm, tried to reach to touch the side of Thor’s face, but his hand would not do what he wanted. He wished he could see him more clearly; the face above his was a pale blur ringed in gold. Instead he relied upon memory, Thor’s face in the moment when he had fallen—when he had let go.

Maybe that was when it had happened. When he had lost Thor’s trust.

A fresh bout of pain wrung through him, though it felt somehow distant.

He wished Thor would speak to him, tell him he loved him as he once had. And if that were not true, he wished that Thor would at least bid him farewell.

But only the wind whirled in his ears, and then at the edges of his vision there was a shimmer of color and stars, soon obscured by the darkness.

*

The others looked on from a distance, arriving at the site to find Thor kneeling at the edge of a dark score of char on the stones and holding the broken body of his brother. Both forms were so still, so utterly motionless, that it was clear there was no more that could be done.

Thor stood up, lifting Loki’s body with him, and started down the side of the mountain. However close he leaned, the whispers from Loki’s throat had been too low and blood-wet to make sense of, and instead of answering he had watched, frozen, as the light went out in his brother’s eyes.

It was likely that, as always, Loki had brought it all upon himself. And a year spent pretending at being a hero was not enough to erase all his other deeds.

But as he solemnly carried his brother home, Thor found himself staring at Loki’s face. There were bruises, and Loki’s dark hair was matted against the skin in smears of blood, and even now there lingered a look of sorrow and longing like one that Thor had once been unable to forget, the look he had worn before he steeled himself to relax his grip and let himself fall. The look that had haunted Thor when he thought his brother dead, fallen into the darkness between worlds.

At the foot of the mountain, Thor held the cold body more tightly, brought it closer, pressed his lips to Loki’s brow.

And as he reached the site of the renewed Bifrost, the slow-gathering storm let loose its rain.

***


End file.
